Nov 08 2006
Hardliners Go Down
JD Hayworth, hardline on immigration, has lost. I like JD Hayworth, but the hardline right did push a lot of centrist conservatives (not me of course) away. This is why you don’t go beyond your real base – which is more than the far right. Keep the centrists in your camp. Make some concesssions. The Reps have their fence and lost the house. Hello!
Bush may have been right about immigration.
Burns in MT looking sadder and sadder. Wilson still back but Santa Fe county still reporting 0% vote.
Yes, he was. One thing people forget is VA, and my home town Herndon, has been at the center of the immigrartion debate. Amnesty does not include paying back taxes. That in itself is a huge burden for anyone to have to repay a portion of their taxes every year. It is like getting the penalty for the pay raise that never comes. I know a lot of Reps who wanted some punishment for not being conservative enough. Do they think my reaching out to the new conservative Dems will be a punishment? Are we learning yet?
“The Reps have their fence and lost the house. ”
Did they really even get that? Last time I was following the issue, they got an authorization for a fence but no money to actually build it. They didn’t even get a pig in a poke if that is the case, all they got was the poke. Just left holding the bag.
the fence and the loss of the house have no connection. jd was losing for over a year. he was a nativist–like bill the butcher in gangs of new york–that’s why he lost. the fence was a separate issue that folks like him jumped on. …….anyway it is a moot point. the fence will never get built and the borders will be left open now that the dems have the house. there will be no job place sanctions except to make a few headlines. twenty years from now we will have 30 million illegals and they will vote democrat. in fact there won’t be any illegals they will be dual citizens…………
this is our future
http://tinyurl.com/gz9v7
With Burns going down, the Allen race means everything. It is going to be WW3. Lieberman is sitting in a pretty hot seat. Goat or God……this is going to be fun to watch.
All the really hard edged people lost. Immigration is a fact, we need immigrants, we need a discussion on how many and how. You don’t need to make people into villains because they cross the border. People are looking for the bad guys. The House made all the crossers bad guys.
Thing is, Kathie, only half the illegals in the US snuck in. The other half came across through legitimate border crossings with legitimate visas. They just didn’t go home when the visa expired. All of this debate and inflamation of emotions to only fix half the problem seems somehow such a waste for everyone involved.
they got an authorization for a fence but no money to actually build it.
They actually got the money in the bill before the fence bill, but it’ll likely never get built. Unless Reps get back in 08, By then we’ll have a couple million more dual citizens.
Last time I checked, Lincoln Chafee was anything but a hardliner. We’ve had a discussion on immigration for the last 40 years, the pro-immigrant faction wins every time, and leaves the rest of the taxpayers- especially the border states with Mexico (listen up, AJ) – the bill.
I went to school in Va. and always admired their conservative and religious values. I can’t beleive they are electing Webb after all the trash in his novels was revealed. It is so sordid and sick.
It is not only people from south of the border who overstay a visa, why not have a discussion on how to track every body with a visa. I think sometimes the bloggers jump on an issue too fast and force it with out giving answers. Like the Dubi (sp) ports deal. We whipped up a frenzy before thinking it through. Any way the immigration issue is not going away so someone needs to think up a way to track people in this country.
Dems have no morals or standards, winning is all that matters to them
Good luck with the tracking with the Dems in the house and grid lock in the Senate.
The media is going to be poking their fingers into everything for the next two years.
What a crock we need immigrants.
If we did not stop aborting our own their we probably would have our 3o million plus and as an umemployed tech worker I say the exact opposite. There are still Americans looking for work.
The stupid Americans have just put another nail in their own coffin.
We have lost at least 22 in the house with a minimum of 6 more (looking at the returns) that will end up in recounts….so even splitting the recounds we are going down 25 and maybe more.
Here come the 70’s all over again.
I strongly believe that people are looking at the immigration problem through an obsolete economic lens. Starting in about 4 years the first of the baby boomers will be reaching 55 and many of them will begin to retire. They are still the largest American demographic.
When the boomers came out of college in the late 1960’s and into the 1970’s in put great pressure on our economy to grow enough to give them all jobs. Unemployment was a major issue.
There are two things that are going to happen to greatly change that. First, the boomers are going to start to retire. First it will be a trickle and then it will be in droves. Nearly a third of our current workforce will retire over the next 20 years or so and begin collecting government benefits. The second thing is that the generation that is now in school and is going to replace the boomers is not only smaller in number than the boomers but will also not likely live as long. Overall they are fatter, will have more health problems, the spend most of their time on their rear ends watching TV, playing video games, sitting in front of a computer, and eating microwave snacks. They are expected to be the first generation in over a century with a lower life expectancy than their parents. It won’t be smoking or cancer that kills them, it will be diabetes and heart disease.
But in any case, the result is going to be a decreasing number of workers in the workforce paying social security taxes and a decreasing number of young healthy workers paying health insurance premiums for benefits that go unused through most of their younger years while you have an increasing demographic of people collecting government retirement benefits and an increasing number of young workers with severe health problems.
The result is going to be a bankrupt benefits program and a bankrupt helthcare system and you can’t just fix it by passing a law unless you want to greatly increase taxes or greatly decrease benefits. The alternative is to bring workers that are currently under the table into the legitimate economy and as the boomers retire out of the workforce, you replace them with immigrants.
We really don’t have a whole lot of choice.
“It is not only people from south of the border who overstay a visa”
Granted. I live in a fairly affluent part of California. We have one of the very best school districts in the state. My son is the only native english speaker in his kindergarten class. Want to know how many speak spanish as their first langage? None. They are Chinese, Russian, Pakistani, Korean, Indian (from India) and Japanese.
The illegal immigration problem here here in my town is mostly asian.
The point is when polls tell you that 70% of the population support comprehensive immigration reform and you just blow it off, it hurts you.
the fence’s reason to exist is to stop the hordes from crossing the border at random. without it there is no/cannot be a comprehensive plan. i’ve been listening to “comprehensive immigration” talk for 40 years now. please, save it for the naive and moralizing daydreamers. without a fence there is nothing but 1 to3 million illegals with a few terrorists thrown in for good measure coming across the border every year, year in and year out. short of tattooing everyone on the forehead or setting up a stalinist police state there is no hope of controlling immigration if we can’t control our border.
where jd and others went too far is they were/are basically into deportation type remedies besides the fence. folks such as myself, want to seal the border and then legalize everyone here over ten years. criminals get bounced over the fence.
lastly, saying we need a constant flow of immigrants is a canard. let me see if i have this right—we need 500,000 to a million immigrants every year because we can’t live without them? if that’s true we’re pathetic. our entire economic reality is based on grade school graduates from latin america? give me a break.